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How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

danluu.com

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Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#781

Post by iLoveOncall »

minimaxir wrote: post #404
iLoveOncall wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think improvement has been minimal since ChatGPT was released actually.

That's not defensible.

It absolutely is.

What has improved isn't the models, it's the harnesses.

Give GPT-3.5 a 1M context window and a modern harness, and you won't see any meaningful difference with Opus 5.

It's a bit hard to try with such old models, but for example I use Opus 5 / Fable at work and Sonnet 4.5 at home (because it's free via Amazon Q), and there's absolutely 0 difference in performance. None. Obviously 4.5 is only a year old, not 3, but try with any older model that has a decent context window and you'll get the same results.

In fact I'll go further than this and say that models are currently regressing. Opus 5 is much much worse than Opus 4.6 for example, and it's clear that Anthropic (at least - I don't use OpenAI models much) is just tokenmaxing rather than optimizing for performance.

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#782

Post by RandomLensman »

agsgf wrote: post #778
RandomLensman wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fully aware of the GFC, but not sure what "take down" should mean there in relation to Bear. Not everyone who spoke about house price risk was ridiculed, btw.

Catchy and ironic phrasing of "the financial fraudsters ruining Bear Stearns". It seems unambiguous in this context.

Were there some criminal convictions?

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#783

Post by ssalbiz »

leoc wrote: post #773
achompas wrote: post #334

One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.” You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engage…

In general I have about zero enthusiasm for trying to find defensible interpretations of things that Ed Zitron said, and I generally agree that the name of Zitron just largely needs to stop coming up in anti- and anti-anti-AI arguments since, it seems, he's just not a particularly insightful or reliable voice on the subject. That said, one or two of the specific assessments in Luu's article seem dubious as well, espe…

My understanding is that RLVR, synthetic data generation and a slew of other post-training techniques are what have driven many recent advances in models more so than manual data providers. The economics of that are for sure worse than just scaling pre-training but it is incorrect to think that test time inference scaling and manual data entry are the only ways in which models are advancing.

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#784

Post by SilverBirch »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #161

Consider two propositions: P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving 2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to tak…

For someone who falls in the middle of this a really good read is Quoth the Raven[1]. He essentially makes the argument that proposition 1 is probably true, but that before proposition 2 happens there'll be a massive bubble burst. Analogous to the dotcom boom where yes, eventually Amazon became Amazon, but before that there was a massive collapse. And he does this in a way that Dan Luu would really like because he's giving a very clear and specific time line for his prediction. I haven't been reading him long so I can't guarantee there's not going to be some goal post moving 6 months down the line though.

[1]: https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/the-real-ai-crash-will-...

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#785

Post by wccrawford »

janalsncm wrote: post #734

> February 2025: "I will keep writing this stuff until I’m proven wrong." Wrong (Zitron continues to write despite repeatedly being proven wrong) This was a good one.

Hilarious, but he never actually said he'd stop writing, just that he'd continue writing until proven wrong.

And provably, he did. He wrote until then, and continued after. Since he never stopped writing, he met the challenge.

He's now free to stop writing whenever he wants and still not fail that statement. ;)

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#786

Post by ModernMech »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #684
layoric wrote: post #562

This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, th…

> These tech giants need AI to continue to grow This is unfalsifiable. AI is juicing the tech majors’ growth. And in the modern economy, it may be necessary for them. But did Disney need the internet to grow in the 1990s? No, probably not. Did streaming give it all kinds of new growth victors? Yes. And would ignoring the internet for that last three decades have probably killed it? Also yes.

How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#788

Post by RandomLensman »

coldtea wrote: post #777
achompas wrote: post #334

One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.” You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engage…

> You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Depends if you care about the "prediction" part or if you care about the assessment of the situation (regardless of date). If someone in 2000 said "the subprime mortgages market is a bubble and will blow no later than 2003", they got the prediction wrong, but their assessment would be…

The subprime market changed quite a bit in size and how much was securitized in the run up to 2007, so not sure a prediction in 2000 for a 2003 event would have been easily transferred to what happened later. Would really come down to what specifically the prediction was based on for it to be a bubble in 2000.

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#789

Post by qnpnpmqppnp »

janpeuker wrote: post #775

To be fair not predicting accurately doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong - Michael Burry is the perfect example here, a market may actually just be so fraudulent (AI companies being funded by AI companies etc) that it can defy common economics for a while.

You're right or wrong in relation to a given statement.

If your point is just that there may be an AI bubble, then yes the fact that it hasn't popped yet does not prove it wrong. But that's not what Ed Zitron is saying; he's making very specific statements that happen to be wrong time and time again.

As many said in the comments, it's common for doomers to keep predicting a crisis, every month and every year and so on, until inevitably a crisis does occur and they claim they were right. That's not how it works.

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